[davewiner]

I have vmWare on my Mac desktop, running XP. If you look in the Windows folder you'll see everything you'd expect to see in a Windows installation. It is a Windows installation. That's the sense that I meant to raise the question for thinking purposes about which is the compatibility box. I meant to say you could see it either way. And my guess is that the strategic thinking at Apple is that the box is contianing the Mac software not the IOS software.

That's based on watching Apple evolve stuff, very slowly and carefully, since 1997. There was even some of this kind of thinking in the move from the Apple II to the Apple III, back in 1981!

I'm not looking at this one year at a time, nor are the people at Apple. They're thinking of a transition that might go for ten or fifteen years.

[qwzybug]

The neat thing about iOS and MacOS, compared to Windows in VMWare, is that iOS apps are never 'emulated' on MacOS—they're 'simulated'. In fact, I'd wager that during its development, Angry Birds was run on a Mac far more often than on an iOS device. The iPhone Simulator is just a wrapper for x86 binaries linked against iOS frameworks.

If this is actually in Apple's plans, running iOS apps on MacOS wouldn't be much harder than making these frameworks first-class citizens... plus a whole lot of work reconciling the fundamentally different interaction, document, window, and application models. (Guess which of those 80 and which is 20. :)